
When it comes to professional printing, a PDF that gives the wrong result on a printing press can be very expensive. The bad news is that creating reliably working PDFs can be a deceptively complex business. Layout, fonts, pictures and colour are all embedded automatically. You create your documents in your design program, then use one of a wide choice of built-in or third-party utilities to convert the whole thing to a PDF. The Adobe Reader for PDF viewing and printing is free and widely distributed with all sorts of applications because PDF is used for manuals – if you’ve managed to escape it so far, you can download it from Setting up a PDF workflow at the creative stage seems easy. There’s considerable multimedia support, so you can embed sound and movie files and set up hyperlinks between pages, or to other PDFs, or as URLs to the Web. For example, you could create a different version for high-resolution print, medium-resolution proofing, low resolution publishing, and archiving. The PDF creation process gives you control over image resolution, file compression, font handling, and colour management, and makes it easy to create several versions of the same document simultaneously. Downstream production processes and archive databases only need to be able to open PDFs, and don’t need access to a whole bunch of individual graphics programs and fonts. But PDF workflows are relevant to all design and publishing operations, not just print.Ī PDF workflow keeps everything you need for a document in a single file, including layout, text, graphics and font outline information. This has meant adapting their production workflows to generate, check, submit, and archive PDFs. Most large magazine and newspaper publishers now produce PDFs to supply to printers, too. Larger newspaper and magazine publishers increasingly require advertisers to supply their ads as PDFs. Printers will often ask their design customers to supply PDFs instead of EPS or native formats such as QuarkXPress. Digit looked at what the PDF revolution could mean for your creative workflow.Īdobe’s PDF file format has been around for over a decade now, but it’s only in the past three or four years that it’s started to become important in the printing and publishing industries. Adobe’s PDF document format may have been with us for a while, but it’s only in recent years that it has become central to the printing industry.
